Emily.

Here’s some thoughts about diving from Emily who unfortunately couldn’t join the team to Macau because of her ankle injury. She’s sitting at home with nothing to do while waiting for her evening flight to join us in Macau to watch the competition. So i’ve gotten her to pen something for this blogsite:

“Joining diving has exposed me to a world of courage. For the past 6 months of diving at the swimming complex, learning every dive is a challenge in itself. It’s learning a new dive everyday just like how we learn our gym routines every 2 years and so the intensity is ten times worse than in gym, the courage one need to master is 10 times more. In gym, our coach can be there always to support us should we fall and till we get the move and feeling there, the coach would not step away. But in diving, the coach has to step away somehow, cause we are diving into the pool. Being afraid of heights (not usual for a tramper like me) and hesitating whenever I do a move isn’t exactly the ideal mindset a diver should have, and that was what I had to learn.

“Courage is not the absence of fear, its the strength to keep going despite the fear” -Chloe Chan.

And it really is the case. Every move I make, I risk myself hitting the board, or splatting as I go into the water, but yet we still get by they after they as we start to master the dives. And it doesn’t really help much when I imagine myself hitting the board every once in a while. I agree, I’m not the boldest of souls and doing a new dives takes me ages to get my thinking straightened out but yet I still had to go for it, that’s what really matters isn’t it?

I guess the best thing about diving is the moment before you just execute a dive, a new dive especially, and all the other divers watching you do it, screaming “JIAYOU” and the coach at the side telling you that you can do it. It’s this unimaginable force that kind of powers you all the way and even out your palpitating heart beat and off you go to do your dive. As you dive into the water, be it a good one or a bad one, the fact that you actually did it earns you claps and cheers from the rest of your team mates and at that moment you just feel that all was worth it.

The inability to participate in the Macau competition was a regret altogether. Just for this competition, I had to overcome my fears of twisting in the air, I had to get my dives right in a short period of time and it all just came crashing down the day before I was to depart to Macau. It was a painful process, having known that I have sprained my ankle and I can’t fly to Macau together with the rest of the team mates. Tears have been shed, but I can’t really do anything about my ankle except to pray for its speedy recovery so that I can train with the rest when they get back from Macau. Sometimes fate just pop all your beautiful wishing bubbles and leave you with nothing and that’s when your friends well-wishes come into place.

The YOG diving team including Enyun and Bryant is not a typical diving team I have seen, but yet it has this innate loving force that comes from within, without any need to prompt, and somehow everybody cares from the heart and not just superficially, we have moments sometimes, times where we get pissed off, times when we bully but all in all I realized that this diving team has it unique personality to it, one that not every team in Singapore would have, a team where each and everybody contributes to the uniqueness and it would be just be incomplete without the presence of any.” 🙂